"The Jatravartids are . . . unique in being the only race in history to have invented the aerosol deodorant before the wheel."

— The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Humans Are Special. Aliens are too, but it's more difficult to pass off an alien culture or that of an Alternate Universe Earth as fundamentally different from humanity by introducing a unique set of Technology Levels and social traits than to just have them lack something humans have. Wouldn't it feel alien to be asked what a table does or what the strange noise patterns that emerge from your iPod are?

This trope can be used to pull Aesops in demonstrating how humanity wouldn't be human without love, music, sports etc. or, on the other hand, how humanity could do well without war, money, soap operas or what have you. In keeping with that, there are two ways of playing this trope: either the aliens are stumped by an Earth invention or the humans are surprised to find out that the the aliens don't have it. Sometimes the author might just be complaining about stuff he doesn't like or finds frivolous by showing Humans Through Alien Eyes. Other times, it's just a throw-away gag. And finally, just to be clear, this trope doesn't automatically make the aliens weak.

Some members of the audience find it breaks their Willing Suspension of Disbelief, while others feel that discovering a fundamental if specific difference in an otherwise less than exotic alien culture makes it more believable.

Examples:

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Anime And Manga

The humans in the Code Geass universe, despite their immense technical accomplishments, do not have nukes of any kind. Or at least, not until a character whose surname was Eistein made one with Applied Phlebotinum.

Much like the Tech Tree example above, this example is due to the fact that Sakuradite-assisted electrical propulsion systems were much more efficient than internal combustion engines. Thus, the effectiveness of electric-based systems extends to chemically propelled firearms as well; being replaced instead with Magnetic Weapons.

The Golden Tribe of Heroic Age was apparently so enlightened, they did not need to come up with the concept of numbers, or at least that's the theory Mobeedo comes up with.

Comic Books

Buck Godot: Zap Gun for Hire establishes that every single technology, artform, odd tradition, bizarre hangup, etc. of humanity was already known to the galactic community by at least one other species having invented it. Except... Popsicles. Nobody else had ever thought of freezing liquid on a stick and eating it that way. Our parties immediately became immensely popular.

One arc in the astonishing X-Men covers a mysterious alien warrior trying to prevent an anonymous mutant from fullfilling a prophecy to destroy his wartorn home planet. War and destruction is so central to his home culture that they don't have a word for hospital, and the concept of a place of healing is so against their culture that the one medieval level hospital on the planet is shrouded in secrecy lest the planet's elders murder its patients.

Film

The Thermians from Galaxy Quest don't know the concept of fiction, period. As a result, they mistake TV series like Galaxy Quest and Gilligan's Island for real events. This is related to the fact that they also didn't know what lying was, until they met the Big Bad (who incidentally figures out the plot and finds it hilarious).

The aliens from M. Night Shyamalan's Signs have mastered interstellar travel but have trouble with wooden doors. They also seem to have never come up with the idea of hazmat suits. (They appear to have landed on a planet where pretty much everything is made of flesh-dissolving acid and decided to wander around completely naked.)

Prince of Space features aliens invading because of this trope. The invaders from Krankor have superior spacefaring technology, but their fuel technology is inferior to Earth's; they need the new formula for rocket fuel to start a true invasion of the stars (they have only one working ship, as opposed to the fleet they could fuel with the new formula).

The aliens in Independence Day have superior technology in many respects, but their actual computer technology lacks any sort of safety protocols to prevent intrusion. A lone man with a laptop is able to hack into the network of the mothership, and by proxy, the entire fleet, shutting down their shields. It's often theorized that the aliens are some sort of a Hive Mind who've never encountered any other species with computers, and thus were unfamiliar with the idea of malware.

They did have the knowledge to hack into the humans' satellites and use it for their own communications. Perhaps the aliens simply neglected to defend their internal network from any hacker who manages to tap in hard-wired; they probably never encountered a target civilization who managed to capture one of their fighter craft and fly it back to the mothership.

Can seem literally true in Star Wars - with most of the Empire's ground weapons being equipped with complex walking systems so they have high centres of gravity and are vulnerable to tripping. However, there are wheels in the Star Wars universe.

Paper has been obsolete for so long in this Verse, supplanted by electronic communications and hardier materials, that many races never actually learned to use it: they just adopted audio and holographic technology from other species, skipping written media entirely.

A literal version of this trope is Spielberg's remake of War of the Worlds, where the aliens are shown in the basement of a house, quizzically playing with the wheel of a bike, in an homage to the original novel (see the Literature section below). They're also touching and even licking everything. It would appear they also have no concept of germs which ends up being their downfall.

Arthur Dent can never seem to find a cup of tea. At one point, a food synthesizer's computer is so stumped by the concept of tea that it effectively shuts down.

And then there's the alien race mentioned which invented the deodorant spray before the wheel, so at least for some time, they'd fit this trope. In their case, it's amusingly justified, since they're a species with fifty freaking arms.

Has an interesting twist in The Conquerors Trilogy by Timothy Zahn. The aliens have nearly indestructible ceramic hulls and instant FTL communication. The humans have radio communications and can track FTL ships. So, it's more like "each race has unique strengths and weaknesses."

In The War of the Worlds it is hinted that the tripod-using Aliens skipped the invention of the wheel. There's an odd variation on the trope regarding disease - it's described that their own hygienic procedures were so successful that they've effectively forgotten what pathogens are, so have no defence against them.

The Discworld books invert this with a few throwaway mentions of slood - something which is supposedly easier to discover than fire, and only slightly more difficult to discover than water.

The precursor civilization who used golems for literally everything only ever used wheels as children's toys.

One of the early books had a Mayincatec civilization who had chariots, but the "wheels" were human porters: while they knew how to carve stone disks, they'd only tried to make them roll by laying them flat on the ground and pushing. A well-meaning explorer tried to correct their mistake and ended up as a sacrificial prisoner.

The fifty-one members of the isolated marsh tribe of Fasta Benj, from Small Gods, had never encountered fire or metal before his tiny fishing boat got swept along with the invasion fleet. Presumably it was a very soggy marsh.

Magic is so ubiquitous on the Discworld in general that electricity is still no more than a curious phenomenon. The wizards still manage to accidentally invent a magical computer (Hex) and telecommunications are handled by an elaborate version of semaphore.

Discussed in The Tripods prequel novel When the Tripods Came. The Tripods are capable of interplanetary travel but still use plain old white light to scan areas rather than infrared or radar. One character points out that technological progression is not the same between cultures and points to the Mayans, who had an advanced road system but no wheels.

Also, in the third book of the main series it is revealed that the aliens never developed balloons, airplanes, or any other variant of flying machine, jumping directly from the Tripods to space travel. Speculated in-book to be the result of a combination of their world's extremely strong gravity and a sort of cultural blind spot.

In the Eternal Champion story by Michael Moorcock, where the human's technology level is roughly Middle Ages, the elf-like non-human Eldren have invented many 20th Century modern weapons of destruction, including futuristic ray guns but have never succeeded in making a flying machine. Erekose (who, in another life, has much experience with modern technology) is surprised at this gap in their knowledge.

A literal example occurs in Poul Anderson's story "The Three-Cornered Wheel", where an alien civilization lacks wheels because their religion considers the circle too sacred to put to vulgar mundane use.

The whole plot of Harry Turtledove's short story "The Road Not Taken" and its sequel "Herbig-Haro". Antigravity and FTL travel turn out to be so ridiculously easy to discover that it can be done by civilisations "who can barely smelt metal", but the science involved is so different that it doesn't work with any other form of science or technology, and throws off the development of The Scientific Method. Also, once you have antigravity and FTL, it could be said that you don't need many other forms of science or tech, so they are never developed. You end up with civilizations that essentially stall at whatever technology level they were at when antigravity is discovered. Humans find out about this when they are invaded by aliens, the current dominant local interstellar power, who march out of their anti-gravity propelled starships and attempt to conquer the planet with muskets and linear battle tactics. Given that they attempt to invade late 20th/early 21st century Earth, it's a short invasion, and humans promptly spread out to the stars with their superior technology. In the sequel, humans run into a species that had managed to carve out a small interstellar civilization without discovering antigravity and FTL, so now they are the ones caught in the antigravity trap.

The wizards from Harry Potter, despite having at least one train and at least one bus, do not use electricity or anything else discovered/invented in the last couple centuries or so, even when it would be much easier than what they do (ball-point pen, anyone?). This is Hand Waved by magic interfering with technology/electronics, but there are so many mechanically simple inventions that they could be using... and if an auto can be magicked enough that the electric starter isn't an issue, then clearly it's not much of an impediment.

Played overly straight where wizards, even though there is a substantial population who were "Muggle-born" (born and raised in the "real" world), don't even comprehend everyday items.

Even Muggle-born are only raised in the Muggle world until age 10, after that spending only relatively brief periods outside the Wizarding World for the rest of their education. How much does a 10 year old really understand about technological devices? The magical devices that imitate mundane devices (alarm clocks, and so on) are rather like the kinds of things a child might imagine technological items should be like.

Considering how many wizards and witches marry Muggles, it's remarkable that more of them aren't exposed to technologies in getting to know their spouses. The biggest issue comes when Ron's dad, the Head of muggle knowledge in the wizarding world, doesn't know what a rubber duck is for despite how nothing stops them from asking freely. "Hello sir, my daughter wants a rubber duck but I don't see why, could you explain?"

The Race from Harry Turtledove's Worldwar can fly between solar systems, possess nuclear weapons, and have incredibly powerful computers, yet they have no concept of chemical weaponry, or any sort of battle-field appropriate gas masks - their closest invention, filtration suits, are for cleaning up nuclear waste.

In Everworld, it's noted that the Coo-Hatch have invented a kind of super-durable steel that can cut through just about anything, but have never discovered gunpowder. Until the protagonists accidentally help them do that.

It's also worth noting that David points out their grasp of something as comparably simple as knot-tying and the use of a pulley leaves much to be desired.

In Animorphs, alien character Ax is actually surprised that humans invented books before computers, as he considers the former to be the greater achievement.

Ax is also amazed at the variety of human food, since Andalites (who lack a sense of taste) never saw the need for more than just a field of grass.

The Yeerks have also apparently never used projectile weapons, possibly because they stole most of their technology from species that were already far more advanced. Visser One has to remind the others that they can, in fact, be quite effective.

The Hork-Bajir Chronicles show that this is indeed the case. The first Yeerks to leave their planet attack the Andalites with stone age weapons, plus one stolen Andalite shredder. They escaped with assorted Andalite technology and developed their own weapons and spacecraft from there.

The Tran from Alan Dean Foster's Icerigger trilogy justifiably never invented the wheel, because they're natives of an ice-covered world where it's easier to move things on skate-blades and skis.

In Dragon's Egg, the technological turning point in Cheela civilization was the invention of the sleigh, as opposed to the wheel. Justified in that the Cheela homeworld has such extreme gravity — it's a freaking neutron star after all — that no axle could be lifted off the ground and remain intact.

In Larry Niven's Ringworld novels, natives sometimes find it tricky to draw the line between intelligent and non-intelligent hominids, as different species' earliest technological advancements don't always correspond. For example, some aquatic species use flaked stone tools but have never discovered fire.

The Pak, a hyperintelligent race noted for its ability to construct things like Ringworld, never invented perfume. This has catastrophic consequences for their species, as being able to apply the odor of one's offspring to non-relatives might have averted millions of years of genocidal warfare among bloodlines.

In H. Beam Piper's Little Fuzzy series, the legal standard for establishing sentience is the ability to build a fire and to use language. Complications ensue when humans encounter the Fuzzies, who have fur, live in a temperate environment, and prefer their food raw (thus eliminating the need for fire). They also don't appear to speak until it is discovered later that they do have a complex language, but their vocalizations are beyond the range of human hearing. However, the Fuzzies do have other signs of intelligent culture—toolmaking, ritual burial of the dead, hunting/gathering behavior—so much of the plot hinges upon whether the Federation's legal standard for sentience should include the Fuzzies.

Star WarsNew Jedi Order inverts this, as everyone in the known galaxy has never seen a book before, but the Chiss use them.

According to George Lucas, the entire galaxy reached the electronic age so long ago that eReaders and datapads have been around for millenia, completely eliminating the need of paper (no paper was allowed to be visible on screen in the movies for any reason) for so long that the concept of the codex book was lost.

Played for laughs in the Confederation of Valor series. The H'san apparently think humans are cool because we're the only species in the galaxy to invent cheese.

Wayne Barlow's Expedition and the subsequent TV adaptation Alien Planet features a biological version. The planet Darwin IV is home to many weird and wonderful species of animal and at least one race with human (albeit caveman) level intelligence. None of whom have ever evolved jawbones or eyes. The two primary senses used by most vertebrates are usually sonar and infrared heat vision. It's speculated that the planet's atmosphere was extremely foggy at the time such sensory mechanisms arose, making visible light an inferior mode of detection.

In a display of Schizo Tech typical of the setting, one Warhammer 40,000 short story had a planet which, for local religious reasons, equated the wheel with the blasphemy of scientific progress, and used it solely for executing suspected witches and heretics. The world's main industry was raising groxnote two-tonne (or larger) carnivorous dinosaur-type beasts, which, even when lobotomized to make them docile, have the unfortunate habit of absent-mindedly trampling and/or eating unwary herders. And there are always one or two per herd deliberately left unlobotomized, which are impractical to drive any distance, so they were slaughtered in small towns, and the meat frozen and transported to the major cities by Anti Gravity trucks.

Greg Egan's Orthogonal trilogy justifies this trope with electronics. The trilogy takes place in an alternate universe with its own set of physics. Because of the way physics work, basic electronics are not completely impossible to construct, but it is highly unlikely that the characters (or any members of their race) would ever discover the principles behind it without a lot of luck or help. Despite this, their other scientific accomplishments include traveling through time in a rocket-powered Generation Ship, fundamentally altering the mechanism behind their own Bizarre Alien Reproduction, and discovering a way to safely interact with Antimatter. Between the second and third books, though, they do invent "photonics", which serves pretty much the same function as electronics, except that it works by using photons instead of electrons.

Vernor Vinge's The WitlingJustifies this trope with numerous basic innovations, as having Psychic Powers meant such things never needed to be invented. Notably, very few buildings have doors, because the Azhiri just teleport everywhere, including in and out of buildings. They also lack basic plumbing, and actually don't seem to have invented the wheel—because of their reliance on water for transport, they travel long distances using "road boats" via artificial transit lakes. No one seems to carry weapons, either—who needs them, when you can just scramble your enemies' brains at a distance?

Live Action TV

In one episode of Star Trek: Voyager, the crew meets an alien race which is quite advanced, but was completely oblivious to the concept of music before hearing the Doctor sing. Even after they did become fond of it, they seem to enjoy the music primarily because of its mathematical rather than its artistic aspects.

Data on Next Generation once mentioned a race that developed a written language before the use of speech or gestures.

Played for Laughs in Doctor Who, where the Doctor once pointed out the fact that humans are the only species in the universe that has invented edible ball bearings.

Also in Torchwood, where Jack tries to cheer up Owen during a team camping trip.

Jack: "No other species in the universe goes camping. Celebrate your uniqueness."

In the pilot episode of his series, Alf flushes the Tanner's toilet and exclaims "Interesting concept."

In Stargate SG-1, the Asgard, who are ridiculously far ahead of humans, have to enlist the Earthlings' help to fight the Replicators, against whom Asgard beam weaponry was useless, but guns worked wonders. Thor mentions that the thought of using chemical propellants to fire a slug of blunt lead simply never occurred to them. Presumably, they hadn't used propellant weapons in several million years and didn't think of using them.

There's also the fact that all Asgard are clones whose consciousnesses have been around for thousands of years. This tends to lead to some rigidness in views, although they're still damn good scientists.

Somewhat amusingly inverted in Babylon 5. According to G'kar, it is one of the great mysteries of the universe that every known race has created a foodstuff identical to Swedish meatballs ("Breen" in the Narn tongue).

Also played strangely with the Centauri: they never came up with many technologies... So they bought, copied, and/or stole them from other races, often improving them as soon as they could combine them with what they already had or discovered a way. Among these technologies we have the jumpgate (copied by the Garmak when these were taught a painful lesson in not pissing off the Minbari and the Centauri waltzed in and conquered the survivors), Artificial Gravity (reverse-engineered from Orieni wrecks), and the titular station's magnetic monorails (they never came up with the idea, and quickly developed the technology in an improved version upon seeing it).

The native dimension of Lorne from Angel never invented music, and he's the only native who ever learned to sing. They do have dance, which looks rather dumb with no audible accompaniment.

Multiple Media

The inhabitants of the Matoran Universe in BIONICLE react with bafflement when they discover a parchment left behind by their Precursors and wheels affixed to the feet of the ancient warrior Umbra. Despite knowing what wheels are and several creatures having caterpillar tracks for legs, their ground vehicles all had insect legs, and only one vehicle (the Destral Cycle) was ever shown to canonically use wheels for their intended purpose.

Video Games

Some Civilization games allow players to progress up the tech tree while skipping at least one basic tech. It can be rather enjoyable to achieve flight without understanding electricity, even if the units look no different...

Done literally in the sci-fi scenario of Civilization II: The Test of Time. One of the earliest alien technologies is "circular supports", reading the flavour text reveals that they copied this technology off the humans, who call them "weelz". The text goes on to express bafflement that they invented interstellar travel before coming up with this idea.

The humans of the Fallout series didn't invent the transistor until the 2060s, just ten years before the War, so their advanced technology looks like it came out of a 1950's computer lab, despite having robots (regular and giant), nuclear-powered cars, energy weapons, and AI.

The Drengin don't have such a thing as fiction - rather, they can sense pain and other negative emotions, which give them pleasure. Ergo, their only form of entertainment is causing pain/fear/etc. in others.

On a more literal note, this is why the Terrans pioneered Hyper Drive, which allows fast interstellar travel without the massive limitations imposed by the stargates used by other races.

Unfortunately, humans in this 'verse didn't develop common sense. The first thing they do after inventing the hyperdrive is give it to all aliens.

The reason humans are able to build the hyperdrive is because they are the only ones to discover controlled nuclear fusion. All the other races were stuck at fission (i.e. what we have now), which didn't provide enough power to miniaturize the gates. In fact, none of the aliens invented the gates. They all copied the technology from the Precursors.

In Halo, the Covenant have a long-standing religious ban against creating sapient AIs, meaning that when they go up against humanity's own AIs, the only AIs they have that can even put up a fight are those stolen from humans, as Cortana discovered when she cannibalized one.

In Mass Effect, this worked to Humanity's advantage, as under the Treaty of Farixen, they were limited in the amount of Dreadnoughts they were allowed to build. Their response to this imposed restriction? To introduce the concept of a Carrier to the galaxy, then proceed to build as many as they liked, safe in the knowledge that the treaty didn't specify anything about them!

The people of Boggob from Meteos are in their stone age during the Meteos attacks, but after surviving the onslaught, they built a space ship out of the resulting ore just like every other playable alien race in the game.

While the troll species does have recreational drug use, it has apparently never occurred to them to try lighting their drugs on fire and inhaling them. When Cronus is questioned about his cigarette (which he got simply to add to his Greaser Delinquent motif), he states that he would never actually ignite it, and simply sees it as a waste of a good cigarette.

Trolls, due to being bisexual by nature, don't have words for single-gender sexuality. It's thought of more as a fetish than an actual biological preference. Further, since their reproductive process doesn't result in families and involves an insectoid queen, Karkat has a difficult time understanding the concept of why "incest" would be a bad thing.

Averting it is Played for Laughs at a few points, such as when Terezi tries describing cotton candy as an exotic alien delicacy only for Dave to quip "we have cotton candy dumpass".

Web Original

Apparently, The Mercury Men have sophisticated technology; they can transport between worlds and manipulate gravity. But going from planet to planet via chemical-propelled rockets is something new and threatening to them.

Nonhuman species in The Jenkinsverse never invented the gun: black powder weaponry is too heavy and recoils too hard for aliens to use effectively: They were never able to develop a version that could fire accurately which wouldn't also harm the weapon's operator. For this reason, only humans have invented ballistic weaponry, firearms and effective defences against firearms.

Western Animation

A Treehouse of Horror episode had Kang and Kodos coming to Earth to share their alien technology, which included the most advanced video game they'd ever created: Pong.

The Incans, despite being a considerably large and powerful empire, really never did invent the wheel. This makes more sense when you realize that they lived in rocky, mountainous areas, where wheels would be, in a word, useless. They used pack animals instead.

More precisely, they never adopted the wheel for practical use. Some wheeled children's toys have been found.

Part of the issue may have been that llamas, their primary beast of burden, could easily scale stairs and steep slopes.

One of the reason that a disproportionate number of scientific and engineering advances took place in Europe instead of Asia is that Asiatic cultures never invented clear glass (focusing instead on ceramic and metalwork). Thus Asia never invented lenses, eyeglasses, microscopes, telescopes, and the like.

A minor example in the medieval Japanese army never really using shields. They did use pavise-like shields for sieges, but they were considered to be "portable cover" rather than shields.

In the Yamato period note c.250-710 AD however, the Japanese DID use shields, as this was before samurai existed as such and thus the Japanese generally took more after their mainland Chinese neighbors in general manner of military equipment (which is also why not every Japanese sword is a katana).

Many civilizations never learned how to smelt metal until more technologically advanced civilizations came along to show them, sometimes millennia later, often skipping the "bronze age" entirely and going straight to iron.

Though it might be presented this way in video games, bronze is not necessarily a "lower level" to iron. Iron indeed needs higher temperature that could maybe not be achieved independently without prior experience with bronze. On the other hand, smelting iron requires only iron ore, so any civilization that has found it can produce it. Smelting bronze requires both copper and tin, which could be often separated by hundreds or even thousands of kilometers (though if you're lucky, they may also be both present in the same ore, such as stannite). During the Bronze Age, copper from the Middle East was smelted into bronze with tin from Britain. That required both advanced metallurgical knowledge (not only properly mixing two totally different materials, but knowing you can), and far-reaching trade networks to bring the two together. Good steel is tougher than bronze, but bronze is tougher than the wrought iron ancient civilizations could produce. However, steel was difficult to produce prior to the 19th century, so few bothered with the hassle of manufacture. The only reason bronze stopped being ubiquitous is because the trade network collapsed, and iron was good enough for most purposes.

No civilization in the Americas could smelt iron prior to European contact. Oddly however, at least one of them smelted platinium into accessories and no one knows where they even got it from to begin with. Then the Spanish invasions happened and you should know how that went.

Many Native American cultures did not possess a written language, in some cases well after European contact (the Navajo written language wasn't standardized until the 1920's.)

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